Artaud on Film

Abstract

This chapter examines Artaud on film in two ways: Artaud as a writer, perhaps one could even go as far as to say a theorist, of cinema in the 1920s, and Artaud the actor as a gesturing body visible on screen. For somebody who wrote so persistently about his own corporeality, it seems pertinent to discuss the very physicality of this body as it appears to us across the diverse array of films in which Artaud acted, yet the first aspect that the viewer of these films is confronted with is how impossibly far this body is from the disrupted, anti-representative, dissident body (the ‘body without organs’) that Artaud built for himself through his work. This book has argued so far that the body is expressed in Artaud’s work through the process of mediation, always pointing towards the materiality of the physical objects that he produced. The question this chapter turns to is the following: where might this body be located in the cinema, and how can it avoid the normative structures of representation, or a type of representation that rests on the separation between the signifier and signified? The chapter will begin to answer this sweeping, overarching question by looking at Artaud’s acting career, followed by his writing on cinema, situating this in the context of 1920s European film theory. It then addresses how his writing was put into practice in Germaine Dulac’s interpretation of one of his scenarios, La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1928) and finally it considers how Artaud’s search for a direct, embodied and mimetic form of expression in the cinema bears out in more recent film theory.